3/28/10

I have finally finished watching like 117 episodes of M Squad with Detective Lt. Frank Ballinger (Lee Marvin) driving his Ford around the late 1950s streets of Chicago. Most of it is second unit insert stuff, but you can tell Marvin is driving a lot of it. There are even a few examples of in-car process shots where Ballinger is driving and yet his own car can be seen through the rear window in the background. Sort of like Ballinger tailing Ballinger (which would be a whole other sci-fi plot, of course). There are winter shots filled with snow and slush, which I as a Rust Belter appreciate immensely. And Chi-Town looks like I remember it. If you're a native of Chicago, you might want to check out the TV series. Even if you're not as old as I am.

3/24/10

I've been bouncing back and forth between reading history and biography recently. I finished Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends by Allen Barra. And, continuing on sort of a Great Plains theme, I read Timothy Egan's excellent book about the dustbowl, The Worst Hard Time. And since I was in an Oklahoma Panhandle and Texas sort of mood, I read the relentlessly grim Candy Barr: The Small-Town Texas Runaway Who Became a Darling of the Mob and the Queen of Las Vegas Burlesque by Ted Schwartz and Mardi Rustam. (That's NSFW Candy in the cowboy hat above.) Brushing all that dust off my jeans, I decided to read something completely different with Just One More Thing by Peter Falk, a fast and funny book which should entertain both the fans of John Cassavetes and the fans of the television show Columbo. I was hoping for more about Natalie Wood, who starred in both The Great Race (1965) and Penelope (1966) with Peter Falk, but that was not to be. Falk's book has a lot of photos, including one of Peter with Inger Stevens in an episode of The Dick Powell Show called "The Price of Tomatoes." Anyway, I raced through those 281 pages in three and a half hours, and got started on Gus Russo's The Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld on the Shaping of Modern America, which is much, much thicker and might take me three and a half weeks. We'll see.So what are you reading?Go ahead, tell me.I'd like to know.